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THE DEATH OF AN UNKNOWN SOLDIER

When sixty-eight-year-old Gaspar Lupo died in the late spring of

1989, it marked the end of two meticulously intertwined careers:

one open, the other secret. In his public calling, Lupo had served for more

than two decades as the president of the New York Mason Tenders District

Council, the umbrella organization for a dozen locals and 10,000 laborers

in the five boroughs and Long Island. He’d operated at the highest circles

of the New York labor movement, earning nearly $400,000 a year; the state

AFL-CIO elected him a vice president, and he served on the executive

board of the New York City Central Labor Council.

It was Lupo’s hidden calling, though, that explained his eminence in organized

labor: Gaspar Lupo was a made member of the Genovese crime

family, the largest, most powerful criminal organization in the United

States.¹ As president of the Mason Tenders District Council, Lupo was

elected by delegates from the locals. With one exception, the locals were all

run by New York City crime families. The Gambinos ran one local and the

Luccheses three, but the Genoveses controlled all the rest, so the majority

mob ruled.

 

The Mason Tenders perform the hardest, most dangerous jobs in the

building industry: removing asbestos, demolition, and doing grunt work

for plasterers and masons. They make anywhere from $30 to $43 an hour

plus substantial benefits.² But because laborers are comparatively unskilled,

they’re highly vulnerable to being replaced by non-union laborers,

who may earn as little as $8.50 an hour for the same work.

This is where Lupo and his goombata came in. Officially, it was their job

to enforce the contract, protecting the members from employers who

CHAPTER SEVEN

TOTALLY MOBBED UP

DAILY LIFE IN THE LABORERS UNION

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would otherwise hire $8.50-an-hour workers. Unofficially, though, Lupo

& Co. made sure the employers could hire all the low-wage, non-union

workers they wanted, in exchange for bribes. It was a service officials

claimed to be proud of. “Have we screwed the worker? ”an attorney for one

of the Mason Tenders locals asked rhetorically when confronted by an accusatory

reporter. “Some schnook who can’t read or write gets a job at $10

an hour? Hey, we made him a person.”³

In criminological circles, the Genovese crime family is known for the

discipline and discretion it imposes on its members. All his life, Lupo

lived on the down-low as an obedient Genovese soldier. He avoided publicity.

His typical attire—rep tie, pastel jacket, and dark slacks—made

him look more like a typical senior citizen than a wiseguy; there were no

pinkie rings on his thick, stubby fingers. He followed the rules and took

orders—even from much younger men. His obedience caused more

thuggish mobsters to laugh at him behind his back. “Gaspar’s a good,

good man. He’ll do anything I tell him,” boasted James Messera, the Genovese

capo to whom Lupo reported. “Anything, I mean anything. I don’t

give a fuck if I tell him to jump off the roof, he’ll jump from the fucking

building.”⁴

In public, of course, Lupo gave the orders. Every five years, someone on

the Mason Tenders’ Genovese-controlled executive board would move to

nominate, second, and reelect Lupo. It was the same ritual that had been

practiced in the 1920s when Lupo’s father-in-law, Charles Graziano,

presided over the Mason Tenders.

The locals were just miniature versions of the district council—each, it

seemed, had its reigning family. In Local 66 on Long Island, there was the

famous Vario family—Paulie Vario was “Paulie Cicero” in Martin Scorsese’s

Goodfellas (played by Paul Sorvino). In Manhattan, there was the Giardina

family, who ran Local 23 for the Gambinos. There were two

branches of the Pagano family, both affiliated with the Genoveses; one ran

Local 59, the other Local 104.⁵Mostly they’d been around for generations.

But within five years of Lupo’s death, largely because of his successors’

flamboyant lack of Genovese discipline, the extraordinary enterprise that

the family had built up over three quarters of a century would be shaken

to its foundations. Federal authorities charged more than twenty officials

with labor racketeering. Lupo’s oldest son would go to jail. The government

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would take over the union, wipe out the Genovese locals, and create fewer,

larger locals, which would in theory be less vulnerable to Mafia control.

Dozens of made guys and associates who’d battened on the payroll were

banned for life. For the city’s crime families, it would take years to recoup

even a portion of their former influence—and income.

Meanwhile, ongoing court proceedings exhumed family secrets about

the district council and the individual locals—how mob-connected officials

enriched their non-union construction companies; how they carried

out their pension fund scams; and how their awards of health care contracts

to obvious quacks destroyed the health funds. It added up, investigators

claimed, to perhaps the biggest fund rip-off in labor history.

But the total sums—estimated at over $65 million—were soon dwarfed

by scandals in several other construction unions. Plumbers officials, for

example, would be charged with misappropriating four times that amount.⁶

There was certainly nothing new in running a labor peace racket, however

comprehensive. The novelty lay not so much in what was done, or even in

who was doing it—mob influence prevails in most New York City construction

trades—but in the matter of degree.⁷ The Mason Tenders were

TOTALLY MOBBED UP. Union governance was simply a matter of mob protocols.

All decisions of consequence were made not by union leaders in the

Mason Tenders headquarters on Eighteenth Street but by a Genovese capo

in the family clubhouse on Mott Street. Ultimately, though, what the revelations

added up to was that the Laborers in New York City faithfully mirrored

the history and operation of the parent union, the 600,000-member

Laborers International Union of North America (LIUNA).

In the Laborers, a century-long tradition of corruption had transformed

the casual nepotism of the labor movement into a rigid, almost

pharaonic dynastic system. Mob guys didn’t have to marry their sisters or

undergo ritual mummification, but they maintained a similar ancestor

cult for similar reasons—the promotion of loyalty, stability, and trust.

And even if they’ve still got a long way to go to rival the 2,500-year span of

the Old,Middle, and New Kingdoms, they’ve also managed to parlay inherited

office into life-and-death control over their subjects.

LIUNA was probably the first U.S. union to come under the control of

organized crime, and for more than a century, precedent and practice,

custom and mores have maintained the most direct and most complete

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Mafia rule over a union anywhere in America and probably anywhere in

the advanced industrialized world. The Laborers thus serve as an archetype

of what’s wrong with the domestic labor movement, and the New

York Mason Tenders are a faithful embodiment of the type whose dimensions

have been made unusually clear by the marvels of electronic surveillance.

How can it really be said, though, that the Laborers are even more mobdominated

than the Teamsters or the Longshoremen or the Hotel and

Restaurant Workers Union? All four AFL-CIO unions were identified in

the president’s 1986 Crime Commission Report as the most mobbed up

in America.⁸What’s so special about the Laborers?

Fewer degrees of separation. Compare, for example, the government’s

1988 RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization Act) case

against the Teamsters with its 1993 draft complaint against LIUNA.⁹ In the

Teamsters, only a dozen out of about 2,500 locals were charged with being

run by actual members of organized crime.¹⁰ Most were crime family associates—

union officials who weren’t formally inducted into the mob but

who owed their positions to mob backing and who reciprocated by taking

mob orders and sharing bribes, kickbacks, extortion fees, and benefit fund

loot.

In the Laborers, though, it was far more common for the head of the local

or a district council to be a made guy—like Gaspar Lupo, who actually

went through the traditional Mafia ceremony, where you swear allegiance

for life and they burn the saint’s picture in your hand. In several cities the

head of the local Laborers union was actually the head of the local crime

family. Like the pharaoh, who wore two crowns—red and white, symbolizing

two kingdoms—John Riggi, the New Jersey boss of the DeCavalcante

family, was also the business manager of LIUNA Local 394 in

Elizabeth.^{11 I}n 2003, Riggi—already in prison on extortion charges—

pleaded guilty to the murder of Fred Weiss, a Staten Island contractor.The

murder was a favor, Riggi testified, to John Gotti of the Gambino crime

family. Gotti feared the contractor might cooperate with law enforcement.

“I and the others met and we agreed Fred Weiss should be murdered,”

Riggi explained. “Pursuant to that agreement, Fred Weiss was murdered.

That’s it.”¹²

Riggi had paid the price of wearing the dual crown. Serving as the head

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of a major labor organization had raised his public profile. But in taking

more risks, he had reaped more rewards: the fewer people between you

and the swag, the more there is to earn. Besides, why waste all those six-figure

union official salaries on people who aren’t even in the family?

THE OLD KINGDOM

Francis Ford Coppola, director of The Godfather, says he modeled Vito

Corleone in large part on Vito Genovese, founder of the Genovese

crime family. To understand Vito Corleone and his enterprise in New

York, Coppola takes us back to Corleone, Sicily. But to grasp the malignant

dimensions of the present-day Genovese influence in the New York Laborers

and the union as a whole requires a double flashback, first to Italy

and then to Chicago.

The Laborers are the most mobbed-up union in America mostly because

they’ve been mobbed up the longest. Not only the tradition of force

but the force of tradition combine to repel countervailing influences. It

wasn’t until the 1920s, the muscling-in era, that unions all across America

came under the control of organized crime. But in the Laborers, the mob

had almost a generation’s head start. In fact, organized crime control over

the Chicago locals preceded the foundation of the international union

itself.

But Chicago has to be seen against the background of southern Italian

immigrant tradition and Sicilian labor racketeering. The Old World racketeering

system wasn’t transplanted directly or all at once to America.¹³ It

proceeded in stages, starting with immigrant laborers trapped in the

padrone system. In the late nineteenth century, Italian immigrants from

southern Italy paid exorbitant commissions to better-established Italian

American immigrant labor bosses in exchange for work. The contractors

paid the padrone, and the padrone, after taking a hefty cut—the pizzu—

paid the worker. Essentially it was a kind of peonage,¹⁴ but with a typically

American twist in which successful peons sometimes wound up as

padrones. And the most successful padrones sometimes ended up as pioneer

crime syndicate bosses.

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It was a former padrone who became the patron saint of organized

crime in Chicago and the founder of the Chicago Laborers union.¹⁵ Al

Capone gets too much credit. He simply added, by violent means, to a

trade union empire that had been built from scratch in the Laborers by

James “Big Jim” Colosimo. A generation before Capone, even before the

1903 creation of the Laborers as an international union, Colosimo had become

the principal force in the Laborers. As a young pimp, he’d married a

middle-aged madam and gone on to control a chain of South Side whorehouses.

Colosimo later established Chicago’s first Italian American crime

syndicate—but it was his founding of the Laborers union in Chicago that

made him a different kind of crook.

Colosimo created the Chicago Street Sweepers and Street Repairs

Union: the “White Wings,” so called because of their white uniforms. Controlling

the White Wing votes gave Colosimo leverage over the Chicago

South Side Democratic Party machine, which in turn favored his members—

and his hookers. It was the first fiefdom in what would be

Colosimo’s steadily expanding trade union domain, consisting mostly of

pick-and-shovel laborers’ locals, employing mainly Italian American

workers.¹⁶

What made Colosimo such a pioneer in the organized crime field was

that he was the first to take over otherwise legal institutions—labor

unions—and bring them together with illegal operations in whorehouses,

liquor, and gambling to create an integrated, citywide crime conglomerate.

Wider territories gave Big Jim the power to hire more shooters, bribe

more politicians, and out-intimidate his rivals.

Colosimo did so well he was able to turn over the day-to-day affairs of

the local unions to younger subordinates. The White Wings, he awarded

to his bodyguard, “Dago Mike” Carozzo. Although Dago Mike had once

been indicted for murder, it scarcely slowed his ascent in the American labor

movement. He wound up running over two dozen mob Laborers locals

in Chicago. By the 1920s, Carozzo was a fixture on the executive board

of the AFL. He joined another Italian American Laborers official from

Chicago,“ Diamond Joe” Esposito, head of Sewer and Tunnel Workers Local

2. Like Carozzo, Esposito had also been indicted for murder without

any damaging vocational effects. Like Colosimo, he’d also been a padrone.

But Diamond Joe’s reign lasted only a few years. It was cut short, allegedly

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on orders from Al Capone. Fifty-eight garlic-tipped bullets were found in

Esposito’s body.

In the 1920s, Chicago led the nation in elaborate and closely watched

gangster funerals. The meticulously organized last rites became the simplest

way to grasp the politics of union succession: just observe who

buried whom. In 1921, when a young local Laborers leader, Joe Moreschi,

appeared as one of the six pallbearers at the funeral of the Sicilian Mafia

boss of Chicago, it was a reliable sign of future eminence.¹⁷ Sure enough,

in 1926,Moreschi became the first mob-controlled president of the International

Laborers and Hod Carriers Union.¹⁸

Moreschi would last as long as any of the most tenacious pharaohs in

the Old Kingdom. He held on to the ruling position until 1968—forty-two

years. During most of his reign, no conventions or elections were

held. When he died, at eighty-four, he was replaced by another Chicago

dynasty: the Foscos—Peter Fosco (1968–1975) and, after Fosco’s death,

his son Angelo (1975–1993). The Foscos’ continuous rule simply expressed

the continuation of mob control in the Chicago Laborers locals.

The old White Wings became Local 1001, representing 2,700 sanitation

workers. But they’re still controlled by Colosimo’s descendants—the Outfit—

according to a 2004 complaint by a government-sanctioned internal

prosecuting attorney^.19 And in 1999, Diamond Joe Esposito’s Local 2 was

put under trusteeship for alleged mob control.²⁰

At last, though, with Angelo Fosco’s death in 1993, a real rupture took

place—the wresting of the international union from the Chicago mob’s

control. Practically on his dying day, Fosco was pulled out of bed and ordered

by the Chicago Outfit to jet off to a meeting of the LIUNA executive

board in Miami. There he was supposed to support the transfer of power

to an Outfit-backed successor. He got as far as the lobby of the Bal Harbour

Sheraton. Then, as he was being wheeled in on a gurney in a tangled

array of tubes and needles, attended by nurses and aides, “he croaked.”²¹

Fosco’s death allowed the incumbent general secretary-treasurer, the

no. 2 official, Arthur Coia Jr., to round up the votes he needed to steal the

general presidency away from the Outfit. Coia could afford to risk

Chicago’s anger because he had the apparent backing—and presumably

the protection—of the eastern crime families, principally the Genoveses,

who now controlled the international executive board. They had supported

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 his father, Arthur E.Coia, for the no. 2 job, and now they supported

the son for the no. 1 position.²²

Coia Jr. was almost immediately identified by the Justice Department,

in a 212-page complaint, as a “mob puppet.”²³ Still, he managed to last

seven years before the government took him down on felony tax charges.²⁴

He survived until 2000 by skillfully cultivating Bill Clinton on the one

hand and the Genovese-led eastern block of families on the other. Nevertheless,

Coia acquired a reputation as a Mafia-busting reformer. Under an

unprecedented agreement that allowed him to run the cleanup of his own

administration, the Justice Department insisted on getting many scalps,

so it was scalps that Coia provided. Mostly, though, they belonged to his

Chicago adversaries, not his own eastern supporters.

Coia was particularly careful not to bruise the foreheads of the leadership

of the Genoveses’ flagship union—the New York Mason Tenders. In

1994, when the feds issued their 214-count racketeering complaint against

Lupo et al., it was inevitable that some wiseguys would have to go. But for

Coia Jr. to keep control of the Laborers, it was also crucial that many bad

guys would have to stay.

It was a testament to his survival skills that Coia Jr. managed, for longer

than anyone would have supposed, to maintain two faces. To the government,

he appeared as the great scourge of union corruption. To the mob

associates and dynastic families who had run the Mason Tenders for generations,

he was their indulgent uncle, recommending them for top positions

in the new, “reformed” Mason Tenders, and then, when the court

monitor dug in his heels, sending the wiseguys off to top administrative

jobs with the Laborers’ Albany, New York, welfare funds. Displaying both

guile and grace under pressure, Coia surmounted a deadly threat to his

political base. Never before in more than three-quarters of a century of

operation had the mob-controlled New York Mason Tenders faced federal

prosecution: how had they finally got caught?

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POWER IN THE NEW YORK KINGDOM

Gaspar Lupo’s aggressive displays of loyalty may have concealed a streak

of independence or just simple common sense. Perhaps it was just nice

luck and good timing, but as long as Lupo occupied the top office, the Mason

Tenders managed to stay out of major trouble with the criminal justice

system. Under Lupo, the number of people allowed to steal from the

funds was kept within reasonable bounds. The amounts stolen were never

so great as to impair the funds’ ability to pay out benefits, and pension

thieves didn’t advertise their thefts by conspicuous consumption.

Within a year of Lupo’s death, capo James Messera was organizing huge

rip-offs of the funds that were so blatant that even the Mason Tenders’

lawyer, who participated in Lupo’s routine rip-off schemes, was afraid to

OK them. Eventually, $50 million to $60 million disappeared from pension,

health, and annuity funds. Members with AIDS lost their health coverage.

Most of the money disappeared in crooked real estate deals. The

purchase of the West Eighteenth Street Mason Tenders headquarters

building, according to prosecutors at the time, produced one of the

biggest thefts in pension fund history.

No sooner had the Eighteenth Street deal gone down than Messera’s

principal scam partner, a Long Island strip club operator, went out and

bought four Mercedes Benzes and a yacht. In 1990, the U.S. attorney for

the Southern District indicted Messera and half a dozen members of his

crew on unrelated charges. Most of the made guys did time. Messera himself

got thirty-nine months. Finally, in 1994,Messera was indicted for his

role in the pension fund scam.

Both of Lupo’s sons, Frankie and Jimmy, the boys he’d groomed to take

over the Mason Tenders after he died, were indicted too. Lupo would get

his wish—his sons would follow him as president. But their terms as top

union officers would turn out to be little more than brief apprenticeships

for prison life.

For a couple of generations at least, criminologists have debated

whether or not organized crime might perform some essential social

function. Primarily because the FBI was able to bug the Genoveses’ clubhouse

at 262 Mott Street and because James Messera, the Genovese capo

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who ran the Mason Tenders, was such a blowhard, we have a clearer idea

of what mob guys really do in unions.

Diego Gambetta, an Italian sociologist whose book The Sicilian Mafia

has become an academic classic, suggests that mafiosi are chiefly in the

business of providing protective services. The “men of honor” help stabilize

transactions in a world lacking in trust^.25 Less academically trained observers

have suggested that the mob is made up primarily of thieves, nott

genuine businessmen. Probably both are right as far as they go: a principal

occupation for the mob is providing protective services for thieves, but

stealing on their own account can’t be ignored either.

Yet neither the emphasis on protective services nor the focus on thievery

captures the key political dimension of mob unionism. The mob leaders

of the Laborers are some of the most murderous people on the

continent. But notwithstanding the muscling-in era of the 1920s and

1930s, the Mafia has been able to capture and maintain control of trade

unions less through overt violence than through their mastery of the politics

of job trust unionism.

Mob leaders will kill without hesitation whoever seems to constitute a

threat, particularly snitches and those who might grab their territory. But

ordinary union members don’t constitute a threat, so there’s no point in

worrying about them. Would-be union opponents can’t muster much of

a following in an institution dominated by the politics of patronage.

Members aren’t involved in any decisions, so they don’t have any information

that would be useful to prosecutors.

John Riggi, a DeCavalcante boss who served as head of the Elizabeth,

New Jersey, Laborers local, has made this point clear. He’s a confessedd

cold-blooded murderer. But he drew the line at rough stuff against his

members. It was unnecessary. When a dissident faction of African Americans

began protesting discriminatory hiring practices at a Local 394

meeting, Riggi’s dad, the union’s former business manager, wanted to go

after them. “Don’t argue with these guys, Pop,” Riggi told his father, according

to testimony before the National Labor Relations Board. “I’ll hitt

him in the pocket book where it hurts.” The ringleader of the protest

wound up working twenty-six hours in two years.²⁶

An ordinary non-mob union boss might have applied the same sanction..

In fact, there’s a lot of overlap: hiring hall favoritism, no-show jobs,

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spreading around contractor kickbacks to subordinates—how different is

the mob union leader’s game from the ordinary corrupt trade union

leader’s? Not very. The aims and the rules aren’t all that different. It’s just

that the mob’s game is played at a much higher level. Ultimately, the union

political game is not based on issues or programs or on principles of solidarity

but on personal loyalties. And the mob knows how to play that game

above the rim. For one thing, fear inspires loyalty. Mob guys know how to

create closer, more reliable, more proactive social networks. They upholdd

and revere tradition; they use ritual and kinship organization. They use

family institutions to substitute for normal political institutions like open

conventions or meetings. A hereditary officialdom requires a closed selection

mechanism. The mob funeral has evolved for this purpose.

LUPO’S FUNERAL: A WISEGUY JOB FAIR

IIn bygone days, mob funerals were decorous extravaganzas. In 1924, at

the wake for Dion O’Bannion, a top Chicago gangster, the Chicago Symphony

Orchestra played Handel. Chicago Tribune reporters described how

the body “lay in state” as mourners silently filed by. Then the pallbearers,

led by labor racketeer Maxie Eisen, president of the Kosher Meat Peddlers

Association, bore the casket to the hearse.²⁷

Nowadays mob funerals are more utilitarian and less liturgical, andd

more like rowdy job fairs than ceremonies of last respect. Retainers jostle

each other for better positions and more lucrative contracts; loud arguments

break out over rights of succession and threaten to drown out the

organ music.

At the funeral of Arthur Coia Sr., in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1993,

Coia Jr., the Laborers’ newly selected general president, complained about

two thick-necked mourners who arrived from Chicago. At full volume,

they threatened trouble if Coia didn’t return LIUNA to the hands of those

who owned it. A generation before, it had been the Chicago mob that enforcedd

funeral discipline. At Peter Fosco Sr.’s 1975 funeral, Terence J.

O’Sullivan, the father of the reigning LIUNA president, was forced into

early retirement as punishment for disrupting the proceedings with hiss

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importunate demands for higher office. Similar threats and barely suppressed

violence marked Gaspar Lupo’s final hours above ground.

Frankie Lupo, Gaspar’s oldest son at forty-five, stood next in the Lupo

line of succession for the $391,000-a-year president’s job. He complained

about the buzzing crowd of favor-seeking retainers at Vernon C.Wagner’s

two-room funeral parlor in Hicksville, Long Island. In one room lay the

body and the principal mourners. In the other, recalled Frankie Lupo,

“there were all these officials having loud conversations. You go to your father’ss

funeral and you’ve got some person that doesn’t even have the respect

to wait till the funeral’s over to talk about jobs.”²⁸

But Frankie Lupo himself turned out to be the biggest favor seeker at

his father’s funeral. Not only did he want the top job for himself, hee

wanted his brother Jimmy to get the no. 2 job.

At least that’s how Genovese boss James Messera remembered it.“ Now

at the funeral the first day I was there,” Messera recounted a few weeks

later, “Frankie [Lupo] was there. And I told Frankie, ‘You got the number

one position there.’ He says, ‘Can I put my brother there?’” Frankie was

asking for the two top Mason Tenders positions—president for himself

and business manager for his brother. His father had held them both. Besides

the salaries, whoever got the positions could serve as a pension andd

benefit fund trustee.

Messera claimed he wanted to divide the patronage plums more evenly.

“‘You know,’ I says, ‘Frankie, I want to put Baldo [Mule], give him a shot.

He’ll retire in six and a half years. . . . Let him retire with a little dignity outt

of this fucking joint. Your brother ain’t ready for it yet.’” Frankie’s brother

Jimmy was eight years younger. Baldo Mule was the fifty-seven-year-old

son-in-law of Joe “Lefty” Loiacono,  Messera’s predecessor as Genovese

captain in charge of the District Council.

Mule was almost family. He was an adult. And Frankie Lupo, no roofjumper

like his father, needed supervision. Putting Mule in one of the top

two Mason Tenders positions, as Messera explained to a family member,

would mean a pair of ears at the top reporting back directly to the family..

At the same time, Mule’s ascension would mean less independence for

Frankie Lupo, who was an associate, not a trusted member of the family

like his father.²⁹

It was obvious that what was at stake in the arguments at the funerall

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was power—above all power to award jobs and take bribes as well as to

control $200 million in pension funds. But Lupo and Messera talked

around the main issue, speaking in terms of legitimacy and respect..

“You know, my family always had the number one [and] number two

position,” Messera recalled Frankie Lupo  saying, “My father held the positions

until later on in years he brought me in.”

“Well you ain’t going to hold two positions,” shot back Messera.

“Please Jimmy,” said Frankie, “I won’t get no respect in that joint. Fifty

years, a member of this family held the one and two spots. Besides, I know

my father would want it this way.”

Messera disputed the old man’s intention. “Gaspar,” he recalled, “had

no fucking use for that kid [Jimmy Lupo].”He “treated him like a jerk-off.”

Lupo never brought Jimmy along when they would eat together. Still,

Messera decided to be generous and grant Frankie’s wish. “All right

Frankie, if it means that fucking much, all right.””

The real lines of authority in the Mason Tenders weren’t on paper. The

actual headquarters of the union at the time wasn’t on Thirty-seventh and

Park Avenue South. It was at 262 Mott Street in Jimmy Messera’s social

club. Messera didn’t appreciate the comments of Nino Lanza, who had

taken sides at the funeral with the Lupos and even told Messera he should

restrain his generosity toward his associates. “Do me a favor,” Messera

said. “Tell this fucking Nino we’ll make the decisions here, not him. Lou

[Casciano] and Al’s [Soussi] getting a raise. Give them the fucking cars I

think they should get. Get a nice Oldsmobile or get a nice Buick. Whatever

the fuck he’s looking for. You know, one of these sporty-looking motherfuckers.

I just said to Frankie, ‘He’s getting a fucking raise and he’ll get any

fucking car he wants. And give that fucking message to Nino.’””

The night after Lupo’s funeral, the recollection of Lanza’s insubordination

ate away at Messera. “I didn’t sleep a wink,” he complained. “I was

walking the fucking floor.” Messera decided to give Frankie Lupo something

to think about too. He ordered a subordinate to call Lupo .“Tell him

his fucking brother ain’t got the number two spot. Baldo got number two.

And tell your brother because of that loudmouth motherfucker [Sal

Lanza, Nino’s brother] he ain’t got number two spot.”³⁰

Later Messera would explain his concerns about Gaspar Lupo’s son

Frankie to a member of his crew. “If I gotta worry about . . . his son fuckin’

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me, then he ain’t gonna last. He won’t be there five minutes. I don’t give a

fuck if it’s Lupo’s son. I’ll take this motherfucker down in one second and

he won’t be there anymore.”

WHICH SIDE ARE THEY ON?

The Mason Tenders tapes show that while Messera didn’t have the total

control he boasted of, it was only because other factions in the Genovese

crime family had to be taken into account. Evidently, the Genoveses

had the power. What did they do with it?

Despite America’s longtime obsession with the Mafia, it’s still not at allll

clear what the members actually do—besides practice colorful rituals, talk

dirty, and whack people—especially in unions, which have been among

their most important businesses. “It’s our job to run the unions,” Gambino

boss Big Paul Castellano once observed in an FBI-recorded lecture.

Mobsters are frequently charged with “labor racketeering”—but what’s’s

the racket? Evidently, the mob doesn’t work pro bono. But cui bono? There

are only two sides in a market transaction. The buyer—the boss—and the

seller—the worker. Where does the mob put its leverage?

On questions of this sort, scholars connected with academic labor studies

programs have practiced an omertà rivaling the Mafia’s own.³¹ Lawyers

and prosecutors have been less reticent. But their concern is chiefly with

law enforcement, not with the union as an institution in civil society. Hollywood

has provided only a bit more illumination. The classic modern

mob movies—Coppola’s Godfather series and Scorsese’s Goodfellas and

Casino—ignore mob unionism. Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront,made over

half a century ago, gives us a sidelong glance via longshore leader Johnny

Friendly—smooth, brutal, and inhuman. Obviously he’s with management;;

he wears an overcoat, like the ship owners, not a bomber jacket, like

the members. He has thugs to beat and kill informers who threaten his

rackets with the ship owners. But it’s not really clear what the rackets are.

A Hollywood close-up of labor racketeering, like full-frontal male nudity,

remains beyond the pale.

But the Mason Tenders case brings the mob’s presence in unions into

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clearer focus. In the New York Mason Tenders, mobsters were charged

with a huge number of racketeering acts—the 1994 RICO complaint

itemizes over two hundred, and for each act, there might be as many as

forty or fifty counts. The overwhelming majority are for bribery: taking

money from contractors to avoid payment of union wages or benefits, or

both, or maybe just ignoring overtime.

The bribes at the shop steward level from subcontractors for allowing

non-union labor on a particular site ranged from $250 to $1,000.³² Local

officers who controlled larger jurisdictions could nick subcontractors forr

a lot more: $1,000 to $4,000 for the same thing—the use of cheap nonunion

labor. Higher up the hierarchy, though, the Mason Tenders “field

representatives”—all “connected”—who were supposed to patrol construction

sites to make sure contractors paid their contributions to the

funds, actually earned more substantial sums by letting them ignore or

discount the payments.

The complaint didn’t include a single count for extortion. The absence

of extortion charges against what may have been the most mobbed-up

union in America is notable, especially given what mob-involved contractors

have customarily claimed when they are indicted—that they were extorted.

Going back to Thomas Dewey’s 1937 prosecution of the Dutch

Schultz restaurant racket, the classic employers’ defense has been that they

paid money to mobsters only because they were afraid. It’s true that it’s often

hard to distinguish between a bribe and extortion. Ultimately, though,

the distinction turns on whether you get a real service for your money. Are

they avoiding an additional cost or acquiring a significant benefit? In the

restaurant racket case, the jury thought there was a benefit. The ten defendants,

union leaders and restaurant owners alike, were pronounced guilty

on all counts.

Calling strikes and then demanding bribes to call them off is the classic

shakedown threat. Bosses pay just to avoid the greater cost of a strike. That

didn’t happen in the Mason Tenders. And on the basis of available evidence,

such naked extortion may be on the way out. The mob seems to be

more solicitous nowadays of its contractor clients. In the case of one contractor

who paid the Gambinos to have a job action called off, it turned

out that Mason Tenders Local 23’s Louie Giardina couldn’t deliver. The

contractor who paid $50,000 and got no relief felt cheated and threatenedd

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to go to the district attorney, but instead of getting whacked, he got a full

refund and an apology.³³

For the Mafia, pension fund pilfering may represent the canoli of labor

racketeering, but bribery is the everyday pasta. If most of what ordinaryy

unionism is about is getting and enforcing contracts, most of what mob

unionism is about is undermining contracts. Instead of making sure that

the contractors live up to the contract, mobsters make sure that the contractors

are all paid up for the right not to have to live up to them.³⁴

One dialogue that took place in 1989 in Little Italy is a virtual one-actt

play illustrating how the natural impulses of the legitimate trade unionist

to uphold the contract are thwarted by mob control. The two characters

are real: Al is Al Soussi, one of the Genoveses’ “field reps” at the Mason

Tenders District Council. The job of the field rep is to enforce the contract——

to make sure that the wages and benefits called for in the contract

are being paid to the members. Carl is an ordinary laborer in the Mason

Tenders. He wants to help the union by calling in the name of a non-union

company. Al is furious because the non-union company belongs to him.

Carl: I give him the name of the company. He goes, ‘No, it’s not union,

but we’re gonna get it unionized in a couple of days’ . . .

Al: What was the name of the company??

Carl: D-E-P, something like that.

Al : D-E-P’s my company, you cocksucker, what’re you crazy?

Carl: No.

Al: Yeah, that’s my company. Yeah, yeah, yeah, D-E-P, yeah, yeah, I got

the shake on ’em.What’re you interferin’ it?

Carl: No, I called——

Al : (Yelling) Yeah, yeah, you called the delegate on me! Now what?

Carl: It’s on Seventy-sixth . . .

Al: Yeah, now what? Now what d’ya do, now that you ratted on me?

Carl: How do I know?

Al: (Shouting) Why didn’t you keep your fuckin’ mouth shut?³⁵

Whatever the Mafia’s origins as “primitive rebels,” today’s mobsters in

the labor movement are no populists^.36 Clearly, a big reason why mafiosi

tend to side with the bosses instead of the members is that they are the

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bosses. A mob-dominated union is no more than a particularly virulent

form of employer-dominated union.

PE